Cambridge Advanced writing – learning to answer the question

One of major problems that our students have when they write for a high stakes exam is keeping their answer relevant, sticking to the question. In this post from David Petrie we find some ideas on how to help our students to keep to the question.

Keeping writing relevant to the question is something that learners often have difficulty with. Sometimes this is because they mis-identify the key content points, sometimes it’s because they write their answer for the wrong purpose.

This is the outline of a lesson I did with my CAE class the other day – I used tasks from the Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English 1 practice test book – but this would be adaptable to other levels and your own materials.

The aims are:

to familiarize learners with the language and style of exam writing questions

to provide learners with a strategy to access key question content

Lead in:

A quick discussion among the learners – which writing tasks they like, which ones they don’t and why.

Presentation:

Give the learners a sample Writing Part 2 question (either question 2, 3 or 4) and ask them to work in pairs to identify…

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